Huge news! Only days since what seemed a public defeat for the Jailbreak community and an open plea to Apple to allow tweaks and themes to be officially submitted to the App Store for iOS, @Planetbeing – the one who seems to be primarily working on the iOS 6.0.2 Jailbreak – has took to a small Reddit community to clarify that in fact an iOS 6.0.2 Untethered Jailbreak does exist on the iPhone 5, and he has it on his personal device.

Here’s what he had to say:

Yeah, I’m not really sure what all the doom and gloom is about. The fact is, I have an untethered iOS 6.0.2 JB running on my iPhone 5 right now. The reasons it’s not released are because 1. releasing it would burn an exploit we want to save for ourselves so we can always get in to look at new firmware and help JB in the future, 2. iOS 6.1 is coming very soon and will likely break a small part of it anyway, there’s no point in sacrificing the many bugs it won’t break.

Anyway, where there are 4+ bugs (that it took to get this to work), there’s gotta be one or two more so while jailbreaking is getting harder, reports of its death are highly exaggerated.

This is not stuff I want to say over Twitter with 140 characters because I’m afraid of starting some sort of riot, but I like the smaller /r/jailbreakcommunity more.

Consequently, it looks like it is safe to update to iOS 6.0.2 for all those worried about future jailbreak eligibility and he is saving the exploit and jailbreak for iOS 6.1 which is expected to come very soon.

He continues:

[Pod2G] told me last night he looked into a couple of bugs (without much success) recently, after basically not being around since WWJC, so that’s cool. I doubt he wants to promise he’ll be around working on this full time however. I haven’t worked on any jailbreak stuff for a couple of months as well, not until basically I was flying back from 29C3 in Germany and realized/remembered I actually know about enough bugs to put together an entire untethered jailbreak(still unreleasable due to reasons I stated in my other comment here).

It therefore seems safe to assume an untethered iOS 6.0.2 Jailbreak is in the works, will be released after iOS 6.1 lands, and is compatible with the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, and iPhone 4.